Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton As Himself

“Plimpton!,” a documentary about the journalist and editor George Plimpton, is a skilled portrait of a literary light shadowed by his public profile. The film, written and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, tacitly suggests a reconsideration of its subject, who deserves it.

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George Plimpton prepares to face Archie Moore in a scene from “Plimpton!”Credit
Laemmle Zeller Films

Plimpton was born into old wealth, the son of a mother from a prominent New England family and a judgmental father. Despite being expelled from Exeter, he studied at Harvard and Cambridge, and in 1953 became an editor for The Paris Review, a new magazine championing Philip Roth, Terry Southern and William Styron, among others. For Plimpton, who became its editor in chief, it was an unprofitable but lifelong labor of love.

But his work there was eclipsed by his signature participatory journalism, often for Sports Illustrated. Plimpton dabbled in professional sports — baseball, golf, hockey, boxing — and wrote very well about failing at them, most famously in his book “Paper Lion,” about quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions. Other amateur attempts he recorded included stints at the trapeze, stand-up comedy and playing for the New York Philharmonic.

A party animal of the intelligentsia, Plimpton palled around with the Kennedys and loved the high life — maybe too much. TV specials, talk show appearances and commercials, his friend the writer Peter Mathiessen says on camera, tarnished his literary luster. (Plimpton died in 2003 at 76.) But his writing — supple, vivid, graceful — transcended mere reportage, and his service to aspiring writers was immeasurable. Despite the testimonials here (from Gay Talese, Christopher Cerf, Jay McInerney and others), it is Plimpton’s humility that is most endearing. His willingness to fail, and to give readers a taste of exotic occupations, merits memorializing.